Die Hard 2 question (spoilers, but who cares? the movie is 30 years old)

Cafe Society
21

Yeah, but it’s easy enough to pick apart what’s actually in this movie without having to extrapolate to what might have happened. It’s not an error of the movie that the planes didn’t fly into each other by accident; the Dulles controllers had some warning and would have assigned each plane a holding pattern that wouldn’t intersect with any other planes. The bad guys could have directed two planes into each other, and did direct one into the ground, but their goal wasn’t just to create chaos; they wanted to leverage the threat to those passengers so they could get Esperanza. The more planes they crash, the less leverage they have.

Now that I think about it, there was a whole lot simpler way to get what they wanted. If they’d never taken over all the airport systems, Esperanza’s plane would have landed and he would have been turned over to the U.S. military. Rather than taking over the airport and secretly having compatriots in the unit that was sent to stop them, why didn’t they just plant their own people in the unit that was sent to accept the prisoner. John Amos says to his boss “my squad isn’t busy, we’ll go pick up Esperanza for you.” They do that, load him on a truck, and drive to who-knows-where.

Oh, just one more thing. After circling around all evening because they couldn’t see the airport, all the pilots land safely by following the fire trail that’s laid out along the runway. How? It’s been instrument conditions all night, and it turns out they just needed lights on the runway?

22

Yeah, this is why conspiracy theories flop in real life.

Fictional villains need lots of faceless mooks and henches for the hero to beat up. As you’ve observed, they almost invariably skip over the recruitment part. Some shows actually use it as a point of comedy (eg The Simpsons, Venture Brothers).

One would have to meet the potential recruit, identify some motivation powerful enough to override their established loyalties, recruit them into your organization, and then have them continue to work their day job while you recruit more people. And then you would need to be in a position of influence where you can assemble all of your recruits onto the same squad or platoon.

Intelligence agencies and terrorists can do this, but it takes a long time and there are many things that can go wrong. It’s hard enough to recruit one guy. I can’t even imagine trying to recruit ten or twenty or fifty while simultaneously maintaining the secrecy of your organization. (This is something I always think about when people mention conspiracies that would logically require hundreds or even thousands of people acting in perfect unison while being completely amoral).

There are social and psychological factors that work against being able to organize large groups of bad guys like this. Organizations that do it successfully are neither covert nor clandestine. For example, page one of every cult or terrorist indoctrination manual is that the potential fanatic has to be isolated from their friends and family while they are radicalized. They are cut off from society and live in remote training camps or communes.

Real life bad guys often have an advantage in that they have places that accept volunteers. Robert Hanssen, for example, he access to a list of known KGB agents that he could approach. Others recruit at embassies, mosques, or the internet. But in the OP’s example (a criminal conspiracy among American soldiers) it’s not as if you can just put up a sign. “Now Hiring Evil Henchmen.”

You might actually be better off doing it the other way around. For example, terrorists and criminal gangs have been known to send their members to the military in order to acquire training or information, with the expectation that they would remain loyal to the parent organization despite being indoctrinated into the new one.

It’s much easier to hand-wave it and assume the bad guy “somehow” accomplished this, without actually bothering to explain it to the audience.

23

You mean, they could have just dumped lights on the runway, like in Airplane!?

(It’s surprisingly hard to find an image or clip of that.)

24

Sure, as long as Johnny doesn’t pull the plug again. He’s such a kidder.

25

Clearly you haven’t seen The Wire. “McNulty, you’re an asshole!”

It was very clearly an attempt to take everything that worked about the first movie and shoehorn it somehow into a plot taken from some kind of rejected Airport sequel, and like a similar effort on the second series of Veronica Mars, it just doesn’t work in any way, and makes you dumber for trying to count out all of the logical inconsistencies. Still not my most hated movie of all time, which is, of course, the final Brosnan Bond movie Die Another Day, with that Indiana Jones Vs. Close Encounters movie being a close second. As for the Die Hard franchise, I just treat it like Highlander and ignore all sequels and spinoffs.

Stranger

26

Bruce Willis hates more than you this movie and considers it the worst one hes ever done rumor is hes never seen it …….

He has said "he didn’t understand a damn thing of the plot (apparently no one else really did either ) and there were extreme budget problems which led to really stupid errors (like the afore mentioned Pac*bell badges on what was supposed to be a Washington dc airport it was really a part of LAX that was being refurbished )

Bruse willis hates more than you this movie and consideres it the worst one hes ever done
Believe it or not there has only been one originally written die hard movie and that was the 4th one the first 3 were other screenplays that were "salavaged " for the series

27

Keep your disbelief suspended, much like Windsor 114 wasn’t.

28

My favorite part of a profoundly stoopid movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0Tt7VUMLs8

29

Like, was the fuel door at the bottom of the fuel tank? When I open the fuel cap on my car it doesn’t start gushing out. :confused:

30

I think it was where the fuel was fed into the engine. Is this really a thing with the 747? :dubious: :confused:

31

I suppose that’s a matter of opinion.

32

No. Not in the slightest.

33

Gods, I had forgotten how stoopid that scene was. A trail of cold JP8 (which won’t ignite if you flip your lighter onto it) catches flame (whilst being blown by close jet exhaust) accelerates said flamage (against said jet exhaust) leaping into the air to catch up with a jet during takeoff, where it (manages to get into a gushing fuel spout, against pressure, to ignite the fuel in the tank) causing an empty airplane to explode as if it were filled with C4), with flame shooting though the empty cargo compartment, through cargo doors and into the cockpit.

I can see how that might happen. :stuck_out_tongue:

34

Even if they were just flying around at random, a few dozen passenger jets take up about 0.00001% of the space within a few miles of an airport.

It’d be hard to crash them into each other if you were trying to.

35

Scenes like that remind me what I’d heard in some interview with someone connected with The Godfather. The scene where Sonny (James Caan) is riddled with bullets from several machine guns but somehow manages to keep on charging. The guy interviewed said the experts explained to Francis Ford Coppola in minute detail how that could never, ever happen in real life, why it would be physically impossible. And Coppola sat there, listened politely, nodded his head, remarked, “Uh-huh,” and “I see,” from time to time. Then at the end he finally said to the experts, “But I want to do it.”

36

They’ve even hung a lampshade on this within the franchise in Live Free or Die Hard, courtesy of some snark by John McClane himself. “You have got to be running out of bad guys by now. What, do you have a service or something? 1-800-HENCHMAN?”

37

Even if they could lower the glide slope, it still bothered me that the pilots blindly followed that down without referencing the altimeter.

38

Actually, shit like this happens a lot on ***Mayday ***(aka Air Crash Investigation).

39

(My experience is with small planes only; don’t know if the big iron follows the same rules and procedures.)

Air pressure changes with the weather. Pilots approaching an airport get certain weather information from the local controllers, including a setting for their altimeter so that it will be accurate for the airport they’re landing at. If the controllers gave the pilots the wrong setting, the altimeters on the plane could make the pilots think they were 300 feet higher than they actually were.